poi

Never picked up a set of poi before? This is the video for you! This is a video to familiarize you with the hardware and how it can be held. No matter what set of poi you pick up, this tutorial should help you get to know this tool and how you interact with it.

I love poi moves with superhero names! This one's been on the back burner for a while, but checking out Tim Goddard's tutorial on the move broke down many of the barriers I'd been running up against. While looped in with supermans, I actually think this move is a slightly different beast, but an extremely useful one because it allows you to switch the planes your poi are moving in when spinning in a meteor fashion.

At Tahoe, Ronan taught a class on 8-step CAPs that I was kind of in and out of due to some other commitments at the festival, but this was one of the moves I got out of it. I don't know if it qualifies as a dictionary-definition 8-step CAP given that only one hand in the pattern is actually performing a CAP at all, so I'm just going to label it a multistep CAP and call it a day. I found a way to do a similar pattern in diamond mode, so that's included here as well.

Early in the festival season, Noel showed me an interesting entry to forearm contact rolls--using isolated throws going forwards rather than back. It puts the momentum of the tether right were it would be if you'd performed a pendulum in cradle, so the direction is already set. I didn't work much with it until Alan Lualdi showed me a use for it in a combo of his own making at PacFire. Intrigued, I came up with my own. All three variants can be found in this video.

Spent a bunch of time working on this at Burning Man and Tahoe and finally have something worth seeing! Turning with a 3-beat superman is an interesting challenge because it frequently requires a type of counter rotation that can kill the momentum of the poi and therefore the move. Here are some tips on how to get around these problems--also, it was filmed in one of the most beautiful places I've ever been in my life :)

This was one move from Kate and Keith's 3-poi video that I found particularly confusing given that all the poi were the same color, so puzzling out which poi was doing what couldn't happen until I saw someone else doing the same move in real life. That guy was my friend Willow, who showed me the technique you see in the video for putting this move together. It bears a lot of similarities to Nicky Evers' wavy weaves and requires a knowledge of thumb-led reverse meteor 2-beats.

Buzzsaw fountains were one of my favorite challenges in my first year of spinning poi and it wasn't until much later that I realized they were creating some of the basic skills necessary to get into inversions and barrel rolls later. Here is how you can practice this type of movement and get set up inside moves.

An awesome connect the dots moment! Previously on my tech blog we played around with the idea of doing 3-beat weaves with supermans. We can apply this same idea to flowers by turning the superman into a body-traced 4-petal antispin flower or 2-petal inspin flower. You can then combine it with the other hand to get either a pair of antispins or a hybrid flower along the lines of VTG tech!

One of those challenges I took up at Burning Man this year was to add the reverse Superman to my repertoire of tricks and it turned out to be a really interesting challenge given that the timing for it feels completely different from the timing of a forwards superman. The great part of getting it down, however is being able to turn and do waistwraps with it.

When I did my tutorial on 3 poi weaves a couple weeks ago, I thought the waistwrap would be switching between thumb led and poi led, but at Wildfire I was shown it's much easier to keep the move in thumb led when making this turn. It feels a little awkward to me, but makes up for it in making the move smoother overall and this effect really comes across in the 360 degree turns you do with it.